Desert Sand in the Hourglass
by scratchienails
Summary: When the war ends, Ichigo goes home, only to find he wasn't supposed to be able to. In the wake of battle, issues he couldn't bring himself to face before drive him to seek closure from the only place that might have all the answers about who and what he is: Aizen's labs.


**I can't believe Bleach is over.**

 **Warnings: Depression. PTSD. Paranoia and recovery from psychological trauma and Aizen.**

* * *

When everything is said and done, he finds himself sitting in his bedroom, scanning through the email he hasn't touched in a week. Not all that long of a period, it has only been six days, and yet he feels like its been a year since he sat down on at his desk and waited for responses from colleges for applications he barely remembers filling out. At fifteen, his life got turned upside down. At seventeen, it flipped again.

Now, just months after the last inversion of everything he thought he knew of himself, his world has been tossed and flipped like a flapjack in the pan, continually being thrown up in the air to crash back down to the sizzling surface of a skillet.

He feels numb. The conclusion of this short, but costly, painful, ruining war is fresh in his mind but stale in his soul. It's entirely different from how the conclusion of the last—first?— war left him, when he was fine, so fine, so perfectly fine physically, with the majority of his soul burned away and drowning in aching compassion, indecision, understanding and loss for, of a man he never knew yet always did and there were empty spaces in between his fingers, empty spaces in his vision where there should have been faces and ghosts, empty spaces where there should be voices inside his head and oh god is this what victory feels like—

"Ichigo?" A familiar voice calls from the door, and he jerks up, leaving darkness behind and finding one of his longest-time friends in the door. Keigo looks like he has returned from a war of his own, his usual bright smile missing, replaced by heavy bags under his bleak eyes.

And a knife twists in Ichigo's heart. He's missed something important again, failed his human friends somehow again, in the way he's been so prone too since this whole mess began two years ago, because Keigo would never look like this if something terrible hadn't happened while he was worlds away.

Once upon a time, Keigo and Mizuiro would have been able to rely on him for anything, anytime, and now…

Just more people he somehow managed to fail in his damned quest to protect everyone.

"Keigo," Ichigo rises up, nervous and worried, "hey, man, you okay?"

Keigo snorts, but for some reason the dark atmosphere that hung on his shoulders at first glance slipped away, and Ichigo is confused to realize that for some reason, just the sound of his voice has somehow made his friend slump with relief.

Oh, Keigo had been worried about him. He didn't remember telling his friends what was going on, because when he first set out he didn't know and never had the chance, so he can only figure that Urahara or maybe his dad had told Keigo something.

"Yeah, I'm okay, just, everybody's downstairs, 'cause we want to talk to you."

Ichigo follows his friend down the stairs, not oblivious to how Keigo shifts a bit too close to be normal to him as they descend the stairs, eyes flickering between him and the steps, but he doesn't mention it. It's only natural to want to reaffirm the presence of a friend returning from war, considering how close Ichigo came to not coming back at all.

He finds himself being sat down in his own living room, where two others are waiting. His sisters and father are nowhere in sight, so he can only assume that his friends let themselves in without him noticing, Mizuiro took the liberty of making copies of his house key years ago, so it's not all that weird to find the passively smiling boy relaxing on the couch with Tatsuki.

His three oldest friends, besides Chad, all gathered in his home without invitation. Something serious is going on.

Tatsuki sweeps up the moment he descends the stairs, rushing over. She inspects him with a flurry of action, poking and prodding, confirming, but Mizuiro just waves a little as Keigo sits down beside him, slumping down like a puppet with cut strings.

Ichigo catches Tatsuki eyes, and she stares up at his face. Her expression makes his heart ache, and he catches her arm when she tries to pull away. For a moment, she just watches his fingers, and he realizes the edges of her eyes are too red. Finally, she says, "We thought you weren't going to come back."

Ichigo tenses. "Why?"

Tatsuki meets his eyes with her own again, her mouth dipping in displeasure, and her brow furrowing with what might be pain. It's a frustrated expression, but he doesn't feel like she's mad at him. "Figures you wouldn't know. One of those Shinigami Captains came and said you might not be able to once the battle was over."

Oh. Oh god.

He freezes, the words of all the shinigami repeating in his head. If anybody had told him that, he couldn't remember. That might have been nice to know before. Nobody had told him that in obtaining his 'true' zanpakutou in order to save Seireitei, he may have been giving up his own chance to ever be able to return back to his home, that he might be trading his whole humanity for power, that he almost left his family and friends behind without so much as a goodbye.

Something like conversing with humans would need Kyoraku's approval. If Kyoraku had known, so Squad Zero must have known as well, and there was no way Urahara hadn't known. But they all had made the conscious decision to not tell him.

They _had_ told Ichigo that he had to be stronger. They never mentioned there might be a cost.

And yet, there was something fundamentally unsurprising about being left in the dark about the consequences of his own decisions. Except, the decision of gaining his true blade was never his in the first place, it had been made for him, just like so many times before.

Secrets were nothing new. Kyoraku, Ukitake, Urahara, his father. His friends.

Ichigo takes a breath and tries to smile. "Well, whatever. Doesn't matter. I'm back now."

Nobody looks like they believe him.

He doesn't believe himself either.

* * *

It's not a big deal. But it brings back old thoughts and memories he'd thought he'd left behind.

He was supposed to be over it.

He's not over it.

Ichigo remembers that day in perfect clarity, the clear blue of the Karakura sky, the sunshine on the tiles of the rooftops. The terror that pumped through his veins and the anxiety that turned his stomach inside out.

More than that, he remembers every word.

* * *

"So this is your Spiritual Pressure?"

Black seeped through the man's elegant fingers, flowing upward and dissipating into the air, and his touch chased the vestiges of the energy intimately, as if enjoying the texture of fine silk. "How wonderful." Aizen said, in a voice soft and velvety. His lips were twisted up in smile of quiet pleasure, as if he was admiring an art piece, not remnants of a vicious attack that had shed his blood. It had been so confusing, how he seemed so pleased. "You've matured splendidly."

The compliment took Ichigo by surprise, as he had not once ever heard, in the few times they had met face to face, Aizen say something positive, without a mocking edge, about anything, especially not an opponent.

The words that followed, though, were much more jarring. "Just the way I wanted you to."

And Aizen had smirked with such knowing, such pleasure and pride and no small amount of mischievous cruelty, as he continued on, reiterating the many battles that Ichigo had experienced in the past months. As he spoke, as Ichigo flinched back at his implications, there was a bizarre light in his dead eyes, a spark of something that made Ichigo's stomach turn.

It was not often anyone looked at him with such overwhelming pride.

The man extended his hand, the last traces of scarlet-tinged darkness clinging to his pale fingers, as if it was steam and not highly corrosive energy, and some kind of unholy anxiousness overtook Ichigo's body. Ichigo hadn't wanted to hear what came next.

"Kurosaki Ichigo," nobody had ever made his name sound more like an identification number than that, "all the battles you've fought were a part of my plan."

Brown eyes narrowed as the words hung between them, measuring his reaction, but Ichigo's mind was elsewhere, suddenly overwhelmed with reminders of the past, _blood flying through the air and the sound of bone crunching under a blow, her eyes wide and pained—_

"All the battles I've fought…were part of your plan?" Trapped somewhere between the present and the traumatic flashes of the past, he could only stutter out a reiteration of those poisonous words. His mask had faded with his focus, blown away like petals on a tree at the dusk of spring. Aizen's expression was completely serene, in contrast with Ichigo's own.

It was hard to breathe, and even harder to talk, but Ichigo forced the words out as he lowered his head. Without having to face those speculative eyes, he found his cynical spirit more easily. "What do you mean by that?"

But already the urge to search the mad man's face for some kind of explanation had been building, beckoning his gaze back up, and there the bastard still was, smiling peacefully, as if the sentence the bastard had just spoken hadn't ripped everything Ichigo knew asunder.

The rage, the anxiety, the confusion, it all lashed out.

"I'm asking you what you mean by that!" Ichigo yelled, the question tearing its way out of his throat like a battle cry, fueled with all the bottled up emotions he had built up over the past few days, months, _years._ All the pain and fear and regret lashed out all at once, the despair from Hueco Mundo, the helplessness of his first encounters with Arrancar, the confusion and desperation of invading Seireitei: the hate for this man that was behind it all, calculating and killing.

But he immediately regretted it, wanted to take the words back, shove them down again and keep calm. Ichigo felt like he had just yelled at his father in one of their very few serious fights, a sinking feeling of knowing he made a mistake, that it wasn't his place.

Aizen's expression was disapproving as he raised a single finger into the air, and with a voice more demanding than any authority figure Ichigo had ever known, the madman scolded him. "Your voice, Kurosaki Ichigo. Do not raise your voice." Ichigo's tongue shriveled in his mouth and his whole body felt a rush of pure terror, and Aizen continued on, as if explaining an obvious circumstance to a bewildered and belligerent child. "There is nothing to be surprised about. I simply believed you would be a great research subject, so I assisted you development. That's all I'm saying."

Ichigo had never been afraid of an authority figure in his life, not his father, not his mother, not his principal or his teachers or even Urahara, or Shinji or the old man Commander, and yet he stood cowed and shaking like a newborn lamb. And absurdly, he felt like a scolded child, small and helpless before a commanding and vigilant teacher.

The damning words continued on, slithering around and through him like those hissed by the snake in the Garden. And even as his whole body filled with revulsion, the analytical part of his mind, the side of himself that allowed him to dissect his opponents' abilities and strategies and made him such a good literary reader, his more cherished part of his own intellect that allowed him to connect to and be immersed by Shakespeare, sang that Aizen could only speak the truth in this moment. That with this, every one of his questions, the ones that hung in his throat when he stood by Urahara's side, were answered, only to give rise to tens of others.

He felt violated, suddenly, as if he had been cracked open for all to see, as if his every private, vulnerable moment had been corrupted. His every cherished memory, the most important, shaping events in his life, were on display, like some sick and twisted circus show.

Ichigo didn't want to believe it.

"Hold on," he whispered, as the madman monologued on, each syllable sliding over his skin and tainting his every memory. "Wait…" He wanted it to stop. He wanted Aizen to shut up, he wanted it all to be a cruel lie and to raise his blade and _fight,_ but his limbs felt heavy and his voice died in his throat as he struggled to raise it again.

"Did you think your victories were the result of your hard work?" _Yes_ , the answer echoed through his mind as he slid his foot forward. His victories in battle were not always graceful, or fair, and some he did not even consider to be success, but Ichigo was a fighter, and dammit, he was proud of his strength, his ability to protect that which he loved.

Aizen could not take that away, and so Ichigo shot forward, desperately desiring to prove the deception false by taking the bastard down right there and defend his pride.

Desperation and anxiety pushed his blade, and that was no way to fight at all. Such emotions only held one back in battle, but his shattered confidence allowed for nothing else. For all that Urahara had taught Ichigo about fear, his teacher had never prepared him for anything like this.

His foe caught the blade in one studious hand with ease, bringing his shunpo powered strike to a grinding halt with barely any movement at all.

"Don't disappoint me." Aizen said, chastising like a schoolteacher towards a naughty student, or a disapproving father, and just recalling the moment made nausea rise in the back of Ichigo's throat, made his hands quake. The madman had tried to shame him for losing his temper. "Your power should be much greater than this. Don't you believe what I said?" At the time, Ichigo had retreated a couple steps, but they were faltering, weak movements, those of a frightened, cornered animal, not a swordsman. Aizen could have killed him at any moment then, his guard had been completely open despite his sword's presence in his hands and his instinctual stance, but the madman hadn't. Aizen's pale hand had simply let Zangetsu's black blade go.

He had never wanted Ichigo dead, after all, not even at the very end.

Confusion and fear had expressed itself as rage, frustration and denial. Ichigo had wanted to believe it was a trick, a mocking lie, and it had been easier to fuel the anger than face the chilling, freezing terror. "Of course not," he snarled, fury lacing every word.

"But it's the truth," Aizen said, his voice even but uncompromising, and so horrifically gentle and firm.

Ichigo hadn't wanted to hear that kind of tone from a murderer. "You're lying! All my battles were your doing? You planned all of it? Who'd believe that? You said before that you discovered Rukia after she had gone missing in the World of the Living! And yet you say you knew about me since the time I met her?" He rationalized, snarling like the monster trapped inside his soul, raspy like the lizard he was told he became. "That doesn't make any sense!" Deny, deny, deny.

In his desperation, he even released his two-handed, ready grip on Zangetsu, breaking his already shaky defense down completely. Somehow, a physical attack was the thing he feared least from Aizen in that blood-chilling moment.

"What an interesting thing to say," the madman interrupted, voice rational and almost soothing. It made Ichigo nauseous. "You just called me a liar and said you would never believe me. You claim I am lying right now. So why do you think I was telling the truth back then?"

Ichigo's breaths were shuddering and almost as hard to take in as the winding words that constricted him. He was trying to avoid a web in which he was already entangled; he had been trapped in the inescapable weave of Aizen's lies from the start. But what reason had Aizen to lie back then? He could have simply said nothing, merely dismissed him and left his crumpled, bleeding form completely unacknowledged. And instead he told a little lie, but to what end?

To what end was any of this? What was true and what was false? The coincidences in his life so far, ones Ichigo hadn't ever noticed before, suddenly all matched up into a jarring picture of his own helplessness over his own fate.

"I suppose it can't be helped. I sympathize with you. This world was never about truths or lies. There are only hard facts. Despite that, everyone who exists in this world mistakenly believes that only facts that are favorable to them are truths. They have no other way to live."

And Ichigo slumped, lowered his head, let his eyes leave his enemy and focus on nothing and the world swam and it became, impossibly, even harder to breath. He felt, rather than saw the cruel little quirk in Aizen's lips, the amused and possessing eyes that consumed his submission with relish. The hard facts? The hard facts were that Shinji and the others, captains with centuries more experience then him, leaders that he didn't dare think he could outmatch in battle, had been helpless against the man that stood before him. Aizen had cut through the people he looked up to, the ones that had given him confidence and supported him as he shook before the madman, like paper. Komamura had stilled his quivering hands and the gods of death, bloody and bruised, had gathered before him, bold and unrelenting before the enemy. The sight had been so impressive, so inspiring that Ichigo had dared to hope for a reinvigorating moment. They had promised to protect him, and had fallen one by one before the cold steel of the madman in mere minutes, eviscerated.

What could Ichigo, a fifteen year old freak, an abomination who couldn't even control his own powers, do against a warlord centuries old and endlessly powerful?

"But for the powerless who make up most of the world, facts that act against them are the only truths."

The only truth here was that if the Captain Commander lay on the ground, burned and defeated, Ichigo stood no chance. He had dared to think it was okay to ask for the help of his elders, dared to think there was someone in the world he could rely on, but that was foolish.

Ichigo was supposed to be a protector.

Yet here he was, tired and dirty and helpless, and despair clawed as his very soul, slowed his steps and halted his blade. Some part of him wanted to scream and cry, to rush to Shinji and beg him to get up, wanted to shake Komamura or Kyouraku until they rose back up and told him what to do.

But Ichigo knew what he should do, he should put on his mask and fight his hardest, but screams echoed in his ears and Ishida was on the ground bleeding, _Zangetsu buried in his gut and oh god oh god he did this he destroyed everything the monster won he was the monster—_

Ichigo gave in. He opened his mind to the voice of Iago and let the dastardly villain lead him astray, absorbing every word in a state of overwhelming shock.

"Do you know all of the facts?" And so he received answers for all the unexplained events to rock his world in the past few months, finally; but not from the mouth of either of his beloved teachers or friends, but from the smirking lips of the greatest enemy he had ever known.

And that, _that. That_ made him _burn,_ with familiar rebellious fury.

And rage cleared his mind and Ichigo found that so many pieces had yet to fall into place.

Why? Why was being the subject of this bastard's observation so familiar? Because he had apparently been watching, watching Ichigo as he struggled through blood and fire and smirking as that horrible, violent fertilizer gave rise to new growth?

No, he had known this feeling long before he knew the art of the blade.

But that didn't make sense, didn't match up with what he knew.

There was one question Aizen did not answer, one that suddenly burned through his entire, limp being.

"There's one thing I want to ask you," Ichigo said, quietly, and part of him was revolted by how easy it was to seek knowledge and answers from this man, how easily the conversing came,. Normally he could not even be compelled to question Urahara, even when he desperately needed some sort of information or guidance. "You said that you believed that I would be a great research subject." For what, he had an idea. It was the how and the when that was an issue. How had Aizen known he would become a monster, before he even absorbed Rukia's powers? "Why? What did you base that belief on?"

Aizen turned away from him, maybe hiding his expression, maybe just lost in thought. Either way, it stung. Ichigo really was so little a threat that the bastard felt confident enough to show him an open back. Not surprising, considering Ichigo had already struck that exact spot with everything he could muster. And there was something more important, more raw and frustrated clawing up his throat and out his mouth. "If you saw me when I met Rukia, tell me. When did you believe that?" When, when? When he burst from Urahara's hole in the ground, a mask covering his face? When he lost control against Byakuya, when the voice started consuming everything, devouring his sanity and his confidence and worsening his depression to the point of near inability to function? When had Aizen known Ichigo was a freak, when he himself barely grasped and understood it for so long?

"Since the beginning," Aizen said, as if it was obvious. Ichigo glared, as hard as he could manage, as the back of the bastard's head. He was boiling inside out, with hate and shame and frustration; he didn't want to play word games with a megalomaniac. "Quit talking nonsense." He growled, trying to put some kind of authority into the words. He was all bark, no bite.

Aizen turned back slightly, as if the demand annoyed him. "Don't you understand?" Came the response, possibly exasperated and wondering, as if he pitied Ichigo's ignorance. "I'm telling you it was from the beginning."

The beginning of what? He hung on every word.

And Aizen glanced back at him, with a single brown eye.

The gaze that fell upon Ichigo was observant and measuring, and it should have made him shake from the invasiveness of it, and yet a natural, familiar feeling washed over him. One he felt all his life.

Being watched by those eyes was a comfortable, regular thing, and that's what scared him most. Ichigo couldn't hold in the noise of surprise that escaped his lips as realization dawned upon him, like the morning of execution for a man on death row.

All that existed in that horrible moment was that calculating, ever vigilant gaze. All that had ever existed.

"I knew about you since you were born."

"W—what?" He stuttered, even as he understood the words for everything they were and everything they implied.

"You were special from the moment you were born. That's because you are a human and—"

And everything (the gaze, the words, his trust in his family his friends the world) just broke.

Especially him.

* * *

Ichigo clenches his eyes shut and shakes the memories away. It's useless to think about it. He doesn't want to think about it.

But.

It's a poisonous thought. Infectious. Parasitic. It consumes him quietly, from the inside out. He tells himself, a thousand times each day, to just not think about, but ignoring it only seems to make it grow in strength, like how the voice of his Hollow used to echo louder every time he tried to quiet it.

It's a casual thing. He'll be eating his breakfast and Karin will mention something that happened a while ago, nothing important. People reminisce every day.

And Ichigo will wonder, " _Was he watching?"_

And then he feels sick. A hot flush will rise up his neck: a mix of shame, embarrassment, and humiliation.

He becomes nearly obsessed with it, unable to escape the paranoid whispers in his mind, and maddeningly, he starts to feel that terrible, invasive gaze again, everywhere. But it's impossible, because Aizen is locked away for the foreseeable eternity, and the ghostly feeling in nothing more than a phantom created by his own inability to let it go.

So what, he tries to rationalize, it doesn't matter. Why should he care if a madman was watching him or not? It doesn't change anything.

But it _does. I_ t changes everything. It corrupts his every private moment, and he feels invaded everywhere he goes, never safe from intrusive eyes.

He starts to lock himself up in his room, hiding under layers and layer of covers, with the window curtains drawn, in just a simple effort to escape the constant feeling of being watched.

It's unhealthy. It's hard to change his clothes, it's hard to shower, it's hard to concentrate, because there's a constant prickling on his neck and he feels like he's drowning in the scrutiny of some imaginary stalker; he's vulnerable all the time and _they see they see they see—_

He can't go on like this.

He needs to know, what was private and what Aizen was an uninvitedly observed, because it's driving him crazy. Did Gin and Aizen watch him play video games with his sisters? He can barely pick up a controller due to how uncomfortable the thought makes him. Did they watch him eat, learn his favorite foods just from casual monitoring? Did the snake laugh about it?

How ironic their first face-to-face meeting must have been for Gin, getting to pretend to be a total stranger coming across some odd, unknown kids from the human world.

Did they watch him cry for his mother, all those years ago? Did they watch as he befriended Chad? They must have watched as he met Rukia, Aizen had made that clear, and that hurts, because that moment belonged to him and her, not to them. It was something he once felt happy to remember, a cherished memory, and now it was permanently stained with Aizen's touch.

He can barely stand before his mother's grave, barely go to the riverbank, barely sleep.

And the others are starting to wonder what's wrong with him. They had thought his depression was improving, but now, from their perspectives, it was probably obviously worsening again.

Ichigo doesn't know what to tell them.

After he lost his powers, the whole world fell away. Instead of feeling more connected to the World of the Living, like he always assumed he would, he felt more detached, more other, than ever. He didn't think about Aizen and his surveillance, because he was nothing special, he was helpless and weak, and nobody would ever be interested in him, not when he couldn't even protect what was right in front of him.

The Fullbringers came and went and permanently stained his soul. He was different from everyone else from the start, and he would be different until the very end; and for that, someone would always wish to use him for their own ends.

The revelation about the badge and Ukitake's own watchful eyes is what did it, though. He might have been able to just let it all go, if not for that.

The invasion stung like scorpion buried in his skin, though he pushed it aside easily at first. Ichigo had learned to cast away such distractions when going into battle, since the disastrous run in's with Tsukishima, when emotion got the best of him.

Once the fighting ended, the excitement of his regained abilities faded, and Ichigo was back home, whole and alive with the voices in his head finally where they rightfully belonged, he tried to eat and ended up retching into the toilet.

And his first thought was, are they watching?

Privacy didn't exist. He had no right to it apparently, being a monster that could become a threat at any moment. Too dangerous, too powerful, too unpredictable.

Like a tiger in a cage of a zoo, he was always on display, even in his most personal, intimate moments.

He likes to think the monitoring has stopped, but paranoia churns in his gut and Aizen's presence taints his every recollection, and he can't trust anyone besides those closest, and he's going insane from the constant echoes of _what did they see what do they see i want to be alone i want to hide is there anything thats just mine or are they always watching have they always been watching—_

But he needs to end this, one way or another.

* * *

 **This was originally going to be a much longer in depth fic addressing Ichigo coming to terms with all the shit he's been through an the whole being a hybrid hollow thing, but since Bleach just ended I don't actually think I'll get to writing all that out. So you guys are gonna get the short version! Yay!**

 **Dialogue between Aizen and Ichigo comes directly from Funimation's translation. That will be the only "flashback".**

 **Thanks for reading~!**


End file.
